If you got it, congratulations. Otherwise, don’t worry. Those of you
who drew a blank, or who took an uncomfortably long time to come up with
an answer, are within a safe majority in the United States.

It is a testament to American insularity that people in the United
States feel no obligation to pay any attention to the country that
shares thousands of miles of our northern border. About a decade ago,
one of the more popular comedy bits on Canadian television was a segment
called “Talking to Americans,” in which the host convinced ordinary
people stateside to do things like
congratulate Canada on completing its first 800 miles of paved road or
to sign a petition protesting the government’s reinstatement of the
“Toronto polar bear slaughter.” (It wasn’t just yokels off the street,
either; prominent individuals also got punked. Then–presidential
candidate George W. Bush, for one, famously showed that he was not in on the joke when asked what he thought of an endorsement by Canadian Prime Minister “Jean Poutine.”)

Given this long-standing neglect of Canada, maybe it’s no shock that
it took some 100 days of massive, concerted protest before the student
strike in Québec finally started getting traction in the U.S. media.
Maybe the surprise is that it broke through at all—and that the strike
may yet provide a resonant example for young people in this country
suffering an epidemic of student debt.

Students at
French-speaking universities in Québec have a stronger history of
activism than their Anglophone counterparts, and French-language media
gave the story serious coverage in its early months.

It’s always interesting to watch a social movement become a mass
media phenomenon, as the Québec student strikes have started to become
in the last week. It is rarely remembered that Occupy Wall Street was a
virtual non-story through its first week, even in most of the
alternative press. Many of the stories that did run sentenced that movement to irrelevance. It was only around day nine or ten of the occupation in New York City, after some startling video of police abuse
started circulating online, that journalists decided that this was
something they should be paying attention to. The movement snowballed
from there.

I think we are now witnessing the same sense of escalating momentum with regard to the Québec students. The details of the protests
against rising tuition fees and mounting student debt, which began in
February, have long been available. Yet, as of late April, one of the
few stories on the subject in the United States accurately dubbed the
protests “The Biggest Student Uprising You’ve Never Heard Of.”

The lack of attention wasn’t due to a lack of numbers. Hundreds of thousands
in Québec had rallied on March 22. That’s more than either the Tea
Party or Occupy ever turned out for their protests—and the Québécois
were drawing from a much smaller population.

Nor was the neglect a product of insufficient confrontation. As the Chronicle of Higher Education had reported:

The strike has been supported by near-daily protest
actions ranging from family-oriented rallies to building occupations and
bridge blockades, and, more recently, by a campaign of political and
economic disruption directed against government ministries, crown
corporations, and private industry. Although generally peaceful, these
actions have met with increasingly brutal acts of police violence:
Student protesters are routinely beaten, pepper-sprayed, and tear-gassed
by riot police, and one, Francis Grenier, lost an eye after being hit
by a flashbang grenade at close range. Meanwhile, college and university
administrators have deployed a spate of court injunctions and other
legal measures in an unsuccessful attempt to break the strike, and
Québec’s premier, Jean Charest, remains intransigent in spite of growing
calls for his government to negotiate with student leaders.

In part, the protesters didn’t need the U.S. press. Students at
French-speaking universities in Québec have a stronger history of
activism than their Anglophone counterparts, and French-language media
gave the story serious coverage in its early months. But that’s no
excuse for the English-speaking media’s slow response.

What finally seemed to do the trick was an act of government overreach: the passage of an anti-protest bill called Law 78. As Salon’s Natasha Lennard reported:

In a move indicative of a leadership grasping for
control, the provincial government passed Law 78 in mid-May. Attempting
to end the strikes and force the reopening of the universities, the law
in no uncertain terms makes protest illegal. Groups planning
demonstrations with more than 50 expected participants, according to Law
78, must inform the police in writing at least eight hours in advance
of the protest with details of time, location, size and duration. More
perturbing still, expressing support for demonstrations and strikes
deemed unpermitted under Law 78 renders one guilty of that offense and
liable to face the same steep fines.

Last week, coinciding with the 100th day of the student strike,
massive crowds took to the streets in defiance of Law 78. Organizers
hailed the demonstrations of Tuesday, May 22, when as many as 500,000
people marched wearing red squares (the symbol of the protest), as the
largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history. Daily protests
have continued, and total arrests from the strike now exceed 2,500.

In the wake of the strike’s hundredth day, I was pleased to see
stories about the Québec students start popping up like spring tulips,
with viral videos like this one sprouting widely through Facebook feeds.

Thank you; you are a little late to the party, and
you are still missing the mark a lot of the time, but in the past few
days, you have published some not entirely terrible articles and op-eds
about what’s happening in Québec right now. Welcome to our movement.

Some of you have even started mentioning that when people are rounded
up and arrested each night, they aren’t all criminals or rioters. Some
of you have admitted that perhaps limiting our freedom of speech and
assembly is going a little bit too far. Some of you are no longer
publishing lies about the popular support that you seemed to think our
government had. Not all of you, mind you, but some of you are waking up.

That said, here is what I have not seen you publish yet: stories
about joy; about togetherness; about collaboration; about solidarity.
You write about our anger, and yes, we are angry. We are angry at our
government, at our police and at you. But none of you are succeeding in
conveying what it feels like when you walk down the streets of Montreal
right now, which is, for me at least, an overwhelming sense of joy and
togetherness.

The author is right to call out the smug op-eds that have appeared.
There are plenty to choose from. Social movements in Québec have long
helped keep the cost of tuition low, and this is now being used against
the students. Since they pay less than students in other Canadian
provinces, the argument goes,
young people in Québec must be insufferable whiners if they object to
rising fees. This is the same logic with which all unionized U.S.
workers with decent health care and pensions are told they should have
to give up these benefits upon entering a contract fight, since so much
of the workforce doesn’t get them. It is the local incarnation of
neoliberalism’s famous race to the bottom.

Kudos to students in Ontario, who pay some of the highest tuition in
Canada, for refusing to buy in. Instead of begrudging neighboring
Québecers their lower fees, they’re ready to demand some
for themselves. And given that the strike seems only to be gaining
momentum, they might not be the only ones outside Québec to join in
protest against crippling student debt.

Better late than never. I’m putting on my red square.

Interested?

Some—including Wall Street protesters—say relieving students of nearly a
trillion dollars in loans will help the rest of us, too. Ellen Brown
asks, could it really work?

Michael Nagler on building a movement to build a new reality.

Sure, we teach democracy in our schools—but we need to practice it there, too.

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